Polyphthong
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A phoneme that begins with the sound of one vowel or semivowel and transitions through one or more other (semi)vowel sounds.
"The teacher who uses Pinyin without knowing about such things as the place of the tone symbol in the case of polyphthong finals is merely incompetent but the teacher who supports the student in developing false notions about the language norm by adopting a systematically casual attitude to its technical aspects, can cause much greater harm."
- 2 A diaphoneme realized as a multitarget vowel in some but not necessarily all dialects.
Example
More examples"The teacher who uses Pinyin without knowing about such things as the place of the tone symbol in the case of polyphthong finals is merely incompetent but the teacher who supports the student in developing false notions about the language norm by adopting a systematically casual attitude to its technical aspects, can cause much greater harm."
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.